Local Micropolitics: Nationalism, Racialization, and Neoliberalism in the Developing South

The privatization of the education systems and the labor market, which began in the 1990s as a result of the adoption of neoliberal logic, had significant consequences for the residents of the development cities, which, since their founding, were characterized by a Mizrahi population and a low socioeconomic ranking. Neoliberal reforms that were applied differentially to different groups of citizens created uneven neoliberal spaces, in which some populations are subject to market logic and others are protected from it. This article offers a local micropolitical analysis that reveals a simultaneous process of dispossession and accumulation resulting from neoliberal governance techniques. The article is based on ethnographic research by Reut Reina Bendariham documenting the modes of operation of the Garin HaTorani (a group of Religious Zionists who aim to strengthen communities’ connection to Judaism), in Mitzpe Ramon, and on sociological research by Sigal Nagar-Ron examining the education and employment of Mizrahi women in the development cities of the Negev. It focuses on the results of the privatization of higher education and the labor market in southern towns. The analysis demonstrates how governance techniques are differentially applied to two Jewish groups, the Garin HaTorani and the original Mizrahi population in the development cities of the south, in a way that implements the key logics underlying the Jewish nation-state, namely the national-religious logic and the racializing logic, and creates uneven neoliberal spaces that lead to the preservation and maintenance of a whitened, quasi-European Jewish supremacy, and the continued dispossession of the veteran Mizrahi population from economic and symbolic capital.